Iulian CHIFU // The poly-ethnic state myth and the affirmation of native nation

Columnist: Iulian Chifu

07 March

Iulian ChifuFoto: deschide.md

The Prime Minister Pavel Filip met with the President's personal representative of the OSCE on combating anti-Semitism, Andrew Baker, who is on a working visit to Moldova. During the dialogue, Pavel Filip stated: "Moldova is a multiethnic country, and the tolerance is our most valuable quality. And we need to educate further the society in this spirit. The representatives of the Hebrew community should feel good and safe in our country."

Beyond the context of this declaration, the unique or circumstantial formulation of the Prime Minister Pavel Filip about the multiethnic status of Moldova keeps the attention. And this formulation, synonymous with the previous one made by Vladimir Voronin, who spoke about a multi-ethnic state, deserves a broader discussion and a relationship with the concepts in the field.

Firstly, there is no the state that have experienced ethnic purity. Neither Hitler's Nazi Germany, after the Holocaust and the purges practiced by the Nazis, had not reached purity , and the Arianism is an excess not only abominable through effects, but impossible by parentage. Since the beginning of time people have been in contact and there are filiations and combinations of trans and inter-racial type, since the ancient times. To preach such a nonsense as purity or mono-ethnism is unanimously sanctioned globally and it is - attention - a practical impossibility. Between the predecessors on genetic line of each modern man is a combination of endless races, ethnicities, types, genes. So we can avoid the degeneration, knowing that the medieval excesses of conservation of royal blood lines led to degeneration and hemophilia and only fresh bastard blood could relaunch the hierarchical lines. The modern genetics has solved this problem long ago and placed it in perspective.

That said, every nation, people, ethnicity (though this is where the political component intervene, not only objective affiliation and filiation elements belonging to a group) consists of a combination ethnicity. And every state has its way through its formation, native components and alien components, imported and developed within the national territory through immigration or other formulas.

In most countries, after tracing the boundaries by Wilsonian version on disappearance of empires after World War I, the nations were creating on the basis of legitimacy of states; and the tracing of boundaries was done by leaving as much of the national territory, historically inhabited by a nation/ethnicity and as less as possible minorities in this territory. In every state remained a native nation, numerically dominant, and a suite of minorities, with increasingly wider rights. Reaching to the European Union model, with the third generation of minority rights, which guarantees full integration into the dominant nation and the full preservation of minority cultural identity, preservation of diversity and characteristic features.

There are, indeed, and multiethnic states, multi-ethnic or multi-title nations. They have also another public reflection and structural formula, and that is how appeared federations and confederations. It is the case of Switzerland, where we have three titular nations, none majority, French, German and Italian. They coexist, work together, respect each other and are all natives. Besides numerous other local ethnic minorities.

In the of the US, a new nation, composed mostly of immigrants who conquered the Old West, we talk about a civic nation, built in the last 200-odd years. A new nation. The natives, Native Americans - or native nation, as they are called - are searched and brought back to the foreground through special rights on the taxes - a formula of reverence and compensation, over time, for the lost lands in the clash of an ancestral civilization with Franco-British-Spanish colonists from the Middle Ages. Not incidentally the most casinos are owned by Native Nation representatives.

More to the point, to qualify Moldova as a multiethnic state or poly-ethnic is an aberration. Moldova has an indigenous nation, with a majority of 60-70% and over, according to the census, made up of Romanians/Moldovans, depending on self-identification. They are legal masters in this land, along with native minorities of Ukrainians, Russians, Gagauz, Bulgarians (the last two - imports at the horizon of 1877 from the Ottoman Empire, allowed to pass by the Romanians and placed in Southern Bessarabia). Naturally, the minority rights are important, and Moldova respects these rights.

Over there are those new immigrants. Firstly, the Soviet period migration, ongoing massive depopulation of Romanians in Bassarabia - especially the intellectuals, politicians, actors in administration, priests, teachers and rich peasants, medium and workers who all took the way to Siberia. Instead were brought representatives of Slavonic nations, especially, as well as other "Soviet citizens", especially in towns, to form the Soviet elite. After the fall of the USSR and The independence of the state, new immigrants have emerged and therefore in Moldova we have citizens of exotic origin states, who came later and settled here.

The question - very good! - Why the Moldovan leaders do not affirm the existence and the rights of native ethnicity? Why, instead, they shake this topic about multi-poly-ethnicity, that does not do nothing, but to over-consecrate the Russians who came here and allows them, without being asked, undeserved privileges ?! Why exitsts this inferiority complex of an official as Pavel Filip - a Pure Blood Romanian/Moldovan, by name, not even with a Russified name - towards an artificially superposed "blanket" (section) of Russians that takes up 6, 7, maybe 9% of the population but dominate as well the public space today?

Well, when there will be an answer and a fair presentation of this reality - the indigenous majority of Romanians/Moldovan towards Russian / Ukrainian, etc. minorities, the beneficiaries of all the rights along with all other minorities, but without the privileges of the former settler and dominant nation in the tsarist Empire/Bolshevik/Soviet/Russian - then there will not be a Dodon, President, who threatens to drag Moldova again in the steppes of Russia.